Sharing ideas and encouraging debate on media and public relations trends

Science

April 17, 2012

PR people and journalists love research and polls. From France comes this academic study that finds people with tattoos and piercings drink more alcohol than most.

Researchers breathalysed 2,000 people as they left bars in the province of Brittany. Patrons with body art and adornments returned higher alcohol readings than those without.

These differences in readings between the inked people and the cleanskins suggested that tatts may be a “marker” for alcoholism, according to scientists.

I suppose that's why they call boozing "getting on the ink".

Previous research had shown that people with tattoos and piercings were more likely to engage in unsafe sex, fighting and heavy drinking, the rationale being they are risk takers.

People do like a drink in Brittany. An expat Australian mate owned a bar in a place called Morlaix (population 15,000) and when I visited a few years ago, his venue was in the top ten of French sales of Jack Daniels.

He was the only person in town who liked bourbon whiskey, so there was a message right there.

So is this (more) flawed research posing as news on a slow media day? Lighthouse’s preferred research partner Neil Stollznow of StollzNow Research:

"The problem is that it’s not a good sample. It is a big sample, but only of those who go out drinking. There could be a large number of people with tattoos and piercings who are at home watching the television.

"To make the conclusion they do you would have to randomly sample the population and then track them to see whether they go out, drink or get into trouble.

"The best you can say is that of the population who go out at night to bars those with tattoos and piercings are more likely to drink more – and although the differences in alcohol levels are statistically significant, they’re under the recommended level for confidence."

The bottom line is that there’s a strong case for research of almost any kind coming with an explanatory label.

February 08, 2012

The news that recorded shark attacks have hit a global 10-year high has me thinking that these much-maligned animals really need some good PR.

I’m not talking about the National Rugby League side that goes by the same name. They’re notionally the team I support, but while my base points the opposite direction from my apex I know, deep down, that they’ll never win a premiership.

Shark is a brand. It evokes images of the gnashing of razor-sharp, multi-rowed teeth, plumes of blood in the water and movies like “Jaws”, where the central character was almost more animated than Richard Dreyfuss.

Drop the word "shark" in a game of word association and you'll come up with "nature's finest killing machine".

Australian sharks have a particularly poor reputation overseas. They’re probably number-three or four on most tourists’ bucket lists of thing not to see when Down Under, just behind Mark Latham.

According to Live Science, of the 79 unprovoked attacks around the world, 32 occurred in US waters and only 14 off Australia. They’ve clearly outnumbered tourists on Australian beaches this summer – which admittedly wouldn’t be hard.

While there have only been a handful of recent Australian attacks, that probably stems from the strength of the Aussie dollar sending all but the incapacitated or the truly lounge-addicted overseas for their holidays, and the surf being deserted.

A serious point can be made here about the frequency and volume of an event featuring in the media being a driver of public perceptions of the level of risk that's way out of proportion with reality.

According to the Florida Museum of Natural History, the odds of being attacked by a shark in the US are roughly one in 11.5 million. Only two percent of attacks are fatal.

On the other hand, the chances of dying in a hunting accident (even without the involvement of Dick Cheney) are one-in-ten.

Which event would attract the most media space?

As an aside, 1500 Americans managed to injure themselves using a toilet bowl product in 1996 (I’m not making this up) while 2599 fell victim to a household deodoriser or air freshener.

PR always has an uphill battle in balancing public perceptions when working against ingrained perceptions, prejudices and emotion. That's what makes it interesting.

January 23, 2012

Mark Twain wrote: "Everybody lies—every day; every hour; awake; asleep; in his dreams; in his joy; in his mourning." Bearing that in mind, you have to wonder about the sense, or lack of, behind some PR campaigns.

An academic blogging for The Guardian in the UK recently laid bare an agency’s use of silly research to gain its client some media space.

Online insurance company einsurancegroup.co.uk paid for an online poll to ask people how often they lied.

Its PR company used the results to tell the world that the Welsh were the UK’s biggest liars, averaging 47 fibs a month.

You can imagine the brainstorm that came up with that gem – and how many policies the company’s now selling in Wales.

Besides the fact that what a fib is to one person is an abominable lie to another, there's the possibility that the answers respondents gave were in fact lies.

A cursory Google search shows 3600+ online stories about the campaign, most of which use the terms “dodgy science” and “cynical bid for publicity”.

That puts a “lie” to the myth that all publicity is good publicity. Any PR company worth its salt would have told the client as much and warned them about trashing their own brand.